New Orleans Classics
Post Author: Blog Master!by William S. “Sandy” Kaplan
One of the great things about being born in New Orleans is that you “inherit” an appreciation for its cuisine almost as soon as you emerge from your mother’s womb. You grow up riding the streetcar and eating snowballs and saltwater taffy in the summer. You have coffee and beignets with you parents at the French Market, and Eggs Benedict for Sunday brunch.
There are as many fine restaurants, food and drink recipes and cookbooks on our New Orleans cuisine as you could want. Most are better than average and the ones that aren’t all that great are better than most you’ll find in other parts of the country! (Oh heavens, I can hear the calls coming in already.)
We eat to live and live to eat in New Orleans. My friend and current Editor, Marcelle Bienvenu was the Editor of the Times Picayune Creole Cookbook Sesquicentennial Edition, which celebrated 150 years of New Orleanscuisine. Aside from being a great cookbook, it is a fascinating look at New Orleans and the cuisine that made the city famous.
I cannot begin to discuss our cuisine without excerpting a paragraph for the Introduction to the First Edition, because it truly sets the stage for all that is good about New Orleans cuisine. “Time was when the question of a Creole Cook Book would have been, as far as New Orleans is concerned, as useless an addition to our local literature as it is now a necessity, for the Creole cooks of nearly two hundred years ago, carefully instructed and directed by their Creole mistresses, who received their inheritance of gastronomic lore from France, where the art of good cooking first had birth, faithfully transmitted their knowledge to their progeny, and these, quick to appreciate and understand, with a keen intelligence and zeal born of the desire to please, improvised and improved upon the products of the cuisine of Louisiana’s mother country; then came the Spanish domination, with its influx of rich and stately dishes, brought over by the grand dames of Spain of a century and a half ago; after that came the gradual amalgamation of the two races on Louisiana’s soil, and with this was evolved a new school of cookery, partaking of the best elements of the French and Spanish cuisines, and yet peculiarly distinct from either, a system of cookery that has held its own through succeeding generations and which drew from even such a learned authority as Thackeray, that noted tribute to New Orleans, “the old Franco-Spanish city on the banks of the Mississippi, where, of all the cities in the world, you can eat the most and suffer the least, where Claret is as good as at Bordeaux, and where a Ragout and a Bouillabaisse can be had, the like of which was never eaten in Marseilles or Paris.”
We have a heritage of food of which few cities in America can boast. It is entwined in our history and our daily being. Where else can you have lunch and while you’re eating, plan on where and what you’re going to eat for supper? Right here in New Orleans, that’s where. Here are a few classic recipes from the Big Easy. The main dish is an old, classic New Orleans Creole dish that has been a long time favorite for generations at the city’s old restaurants. Named for George Benjamin Eugene Clemenceau, a French statesman born in 1841 who became the premier of France in 1906, the dish was created in New Orleans to honor him. Chicken Clemenceau is an impressive collection of ingredients topped with b√©arnaise sauce
Filed Under: Food Talk
